Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Irish-Man did a bang-up job covering this for us, and he’s still putting these reports together for you:
Hello everyone, top o’ the morning to you. Irish-Man here with Part Two of my ShoWest report. Part One went a little long, but this section will hopefully be shorter and more to the point. This section will cover the promotional lunch and the “Anger Management” screening and party. In a day or two, Part Three will wrap it up with the Universal product reel, the “Dreamcatcher” screening, and a little bit about the press interviews.
Here’s Part Two:
Wednesday afternoon there was a promotional lunch where most of the major studios had booths promoting their hopeful hits. I was surprised at the fact that most booths chose to emphasize one movie exclusively instead of highlighting the studio’s entire slate. Here are the booths that were present, with some notes.
Universal: American Wedding (American Pie 3). This booth just had pictures of the cast. No Chris Klein, no Tara Reid, no big loss. It did include Alyson Hannigan’s fictional parents at the wedding.
Warner Bros: Matrix (Animatrix, Matrix movies, Matrix videogame. There was an extended preview for all of the Animatrix shorts. They look fantastic, and the different styles are very evident. One of them, “Detective Story,” almost looks black and white; the colors are washed out and used sparingly. I can’t wait to see them all. The preview for the Matrix videogame (Enter the Matrix) looks good if you are a game player. The part I liked best were the clips they showed from the footage shot just for the game. Very high production values; they could be scenes from the movies.
They talked to Jada Pinkett Smith, and she said there were plot points in the videogame footage that would be important between the second and third films. I won’t be playing the game, but I am wondering if there is any way to see this game footage without playing it. I hope so. They also showed the same preview for the movies that we saw during the Super Bowl.
New Line: Nothing but banners for their upcoming 2003 releases. One of them did say Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, but that’s it. Just titles, no material at all.
MGM: Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, and Blonde. Pictures of the cast from the movie and a couple of girls dressed in pink to take pictures with. Nothing that made me want to see it.
Lion’s Gate: Confidence. One of the small distributors had a little booth for Confidence, but there was very little information. There were four posters, one for each of the main characters. Each was in a different color and had a different caption. Edward Burns is The Player, Dustin Hoffman is The King, Rachel Weisz is The Bait, and Andy Garcia is The Law. That was it, but it looked interesting.
Broken Lizard: Club Dread. From the group that made Super Troopers, there was a big booth for their next movie, Club Dread. However, there were no pictures, no previews, nothing at all but a big fake beach resort set. I got no information from the booth other than that it looked fun and goofy. No surprise there.
DreamWorks: Envy. This movie stars Jack Black, Ben Stiller, and Christopher Walken. At this booth was a video running in a loop with clips and interviews. Basically, Jack Black is an ordinary guy who gets rich and his best friend and neighbor Ben Stiller gets left behind. Stiller than has an acute case of the titular envy, and goes nuts. The clips showed some physical comedy with Stiller falling down a hill and some of Jack Black’s newly acquired purchases after he hits it big. Like an enormous painting of wolves at a bowling alley. Christopher Walken is in this, but I’m not sure what role he has. What I do know is that he had this long, grungy looking wig that made him like a hippie who is WAY past his prime. Just seeing him wearing the wig and a loud shirt was funny by itself. This looks like a comedy to keep a close eye on as it gets closer.
Buena Vista: Finding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. Yes, that is the official title of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie now. The only thing at this booth was a handout page of production notes for Finding Nemo (along with a big plastic model of the shark staring down at the two fish) and some character pictures from Pirates. There was one each for Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Geoffrey Rush, and the girl, Keira something. They also showed the pre-production art that we’ve already seen and a couple production stills that we’ve already seen. The character banners all looked good though, and I’ve still got high hopes for this one.
Artisan: Boat Trip and miscellaneous. They were pushing the Cuba Gooding Jr. comedy Boat Trip pretty hard, but it doesn’t look like my type of movie. Of more interest were the banners hanging up with future Artisan releases on them. One of them said “The Punisher,” so I guess they are definitely going ahead with it. There was no information other than the title though.
And that was the promotional lunch. In the afternoon, I had to dance a little Irish jig to get them, but I managed to score tickets to the Columbia Pictures and Revolution Studios screening of...
Anger Management
The screening was introduced by the president of Revolution Studios, who discussed Revolution’s upcoming slate. There were some interesting titles, but the only real “news” is that he said the sequel to “xXx” would be coming out in 2005. After that, he introduced Adam Sandler, who kind of warmed up the crowd and told some jokes. He then introduced Jack Nicholson, which got the audience very excited... until he told us he was kidding and Nicholson wasn’t there. It was disappointing, but still funny. So then the movie started and... it was ok. It was a less juvenile version of an Adam Sandler movie, but it was still an Adam Sandler movie. So that could be good or bad, depending on your personal tastes. The movie follows Sandler’s timid everyman character as he gets unfairly sentenced to anger management therapy with a wacko Jack Nicholson as a doctor.
The supporting cast, including Luis Gonzalez, John Turturro, and Marisa Tomei all do a pretty good job. There were some funny cameo appearances, like in all Sandler movies. There was no Rob Schneider, but there was actually a joke referring to Schneider’s previous characters, which was pretty clever for all the Sandler fans. Nicholson goes all out in this, trying so hard to be wacky and hilarious, that it sometimes feels like too much effort. There are some scenes reminiscent of his Joker, except without killing people. There is also at least one reference to both Nicholson’s personal life and his previous movies, maybe more if I missed some. Sandler himself is much more restrained, though he does lose it in a scene or two. Never quite at “Waterboy” anger level though. The movie on the whole is pretty consistent, which means I thought it was kind of funny for the whole time. There are some lulls, some big jokes, and an ending that I saw coming half an hour before it happened. It’s better than Mr. Deeds, but it doesn’t come close to Happy Gilmore. I’m glad I saw it once, but I don’t feel the need to see it again. So I recommend it if you like Sandler movies, or it you like Jack Nicholson being a basket case. Otherwise, I doubt it’ll have much in it for you.
At the party afterwards, there were pictures all around the walls of upcoming Columbia releases. There were two pictures of “Once Upon a Time in Mexico,” which is now scheduled for around October. One picture had Banderas and Salma Hayek riding in the back of a pickup truck, and one had Banderas and two other guys with guitar cases (weapons?). There were pictures for Charlie’s Angels 2, Bad Boys II, and a few small pictures of characters from Big Fish, but nothing noteworthy. There were also two pictures from Peter Pan, one of which was posted on AICN last week.
Well, that’s it for Part Two. The final report will be coming soon, and it will include the cool Universal preview reel, and my review of Dreamcatcher. See you soon.
Until next time,
Irish-Man
We’ll probably see part three later this week. Nice job so far, man. Thanks a lot.
"Moriarty" out.
